I need to understand Cataclysm hate with rational argumentation

[The Stormbringer]

Never mained melee, never will.

Remind me, what did Pandaria do that was new outside of CMs? (and TI which was the last patch of the expansion) People always use the argument of tons of content but I just don't see or remember it.

I also personally disliked more of the raids than liked them, TI wasn't for me since I was already geared (really hoping Broken Shore won't be the same where they just give the middle finger to geared players), and let's be honest, the theme of the expansion was fucking awful. I don't mind Pandas or Chinatown, but an expansion where they're the focus the entire time? No that's where I draw the line.

Overall, it made me like Cataclysm better than it.

T12 wasn't awful. Wasn't great but wasn't awful like most of MoP's raids (Most of T14, and all of T15 (ToT)/T16 (SoO)).

Challenge modes, scenarios, pet battles, the introduction of new difficulty modes, rares (not exactly new, but used in a new way), a new class, a new race, and so many dailies that people COMPLAINED there was too much content.

[Cæli]

Just because something is "remade" doesn't mean it's better. Be careful

[Irian]

As someone who personally loved most of Cataclysm, these are what I can agree were huge faults of the expansion:

1. Valor Points only being from raiding and dungeons and requiring you to do them daily in order to reach weekly cap with very little in the way of options was an excellent way for people to burn out on the whopping two they had in 7.1. I believe this is what caused Blizzard to press the eject button and ditch dungeons for a long while.

2. Raiding was simply not as enjoyable as Wrath. T11 was the buggiest raiding tier since classic. The raids themselves, after stuff like ICC and Ulduar, felt bland and forgettable. Difficulty was just generally too high in heroic with no real curve to the bosses, with some being utterly cheesable at launch and early-tier bosses like Omnitron being arguably the hardest in the raid.

3. Dragon Soul existed. People have gone over many times why this is the worst raiding experience WoW has had to offer and I agree with them all. It sucked. Healing was down to AoE spam, mechanics were nauseatingly frustrating or nonexistent and Spine of Deathwing was the least thought-out boss encounter I've seen since Molten Core.

4. While I love Firelands, I can't disagree that it was a little visually uninspiring after a tier of Blackwing Descent. Going from orange and red to more orange and red sucks. I desperately hope that eventually Blizzard starts to understand that monotone raids are visually bland and will someday stop relying on excessive use of one or two colors.

5. The Heart of the Aspects mount was very, very obviously designed to be the Invincible of Dragon Soul, considering the model is actually used in the encounter with Deathwing, and was instead slapped on the store for a cheap cash grab. This is when people started to catch on to the fact that Blizzard was overstepping their bounds a bit with the store.

6. The world being revamped left a sour taste in my mouth as someone who enjoyed the lore of Warcraft. Many beautiful ambient zones with little going on got revamped with the same old linear quest paths. Pop culture references outnumbered actual serious quests. The game went from being a lighthearted yet mostly serious fantasy world of its own merit to being basically a giant landmass of meme. Oh, redridge...

7. Mages, oh man. This was truly World of Magecraft. As a ranged DPS I had no hope of really competing with a decent mage player, and honestly they stomped all over PvP and even for a time had higher DPS than a Fangs-wielding rogue. It was borderline laughable how overpowered they were and how long it took for them to be reined in a bit.

8. Worgen. The alpha models were simply superior in every way to me, and when I saw them I was extremely thrilled. Then they revamped them to be just a bit uglier, gave them that god awful run animation and swapped their more Warcraft-esque stylized look for a more serious and "gritty" look that I can't personally stand.

[Leih]

The main problems with Cataclysm for me:

1) Big lack of raid content. Started out strong with Tier 11, but Firelands had only 7 bosses (and all but Ragnaros were too easy) while Dragon Soul had 8 bosses and 6 of those were just reused models from earlier in the expansion, in a reused zone. Potential rumoured raids like the Azshara one and the War of the Ancients ones were cut.

2) Big lack of world content. There was nearly nothing in the launch patch for Cata to do outside of raids and dungeons. Even dailies were thin on the ground. Molten Front finally added world content, but they didn't add anything substantial after Molten Front either... so outside of raiding most of the expansion was sitting in SW/Org doing nothing. There's a reason everyone who was subbed finished Cata with a bijillion alts.

3) The "redone" world was released a good month before the expansion, for free to everyone. While that's kind of a good thing, it also meant it didn't really feel like expansion content. I'd already seen all the zone changes and new levelling experience before the expac even launched.

4) Trying to tune 10-man vs. 25-man the same really didn't work out. Some fights were way way too hard on 10-man compared to 25, and some fights on 25 were way way harder than 10. Caused all kinds of problems.

5) Dungeons got nerfed to the ground too early. The return to difficult 5-mans made the start of Cata interesting, but it wasn't so long before they were gutted and without Challenge Mode/Mythic+ the 5-man content quickly became completely irrelevant as it had done in Wrath. Was disappointing!

[ovm33]

I for one had a Blast in Tol Barad. Maybe it was just my server but there was always a ton of people in there. My fondest memories of the expansion were me healing on my Druid and a Guildy on his Holy Pally in pitched "Butch and Sundance" type scenarios...

Dungeons sucked. I hear people piss and moan about how easy they were after the nerfs but no one points out that only something like 10% of LFD groups were even downing the first boss in the instances. Clearly over-tuned for random groups. With much more difficult Raids too it drove people to alts or just away from the game en mass.

I thought the Cata leveling zones themselves were... not bad. Other than some of the half assed Alliance quests. Which brings up the the whole Blizz hates Alliance crap. An entire expansion built around jerking off Thrall isn't a good way to please half your player base.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

let's be honest, the theme of the expansion was fucking awful.

Yes lets be honest, there's nothing wrong with having an entire expansion based on Asian culture. And stop acting like everything we face and interact on Pandaria was a panda.

[Kul Tiras]

Are... are you blind? Pandaria had a crapload of content. It was probably the biggest expansion since Wrath, and that's saying something. Yes, the revamp of the old world was massive, there's no denying that, but the actual exclusive 'Cataclysm content' was not all that much.

Less dungeons, raids, zones and quests than Wrath. How did it have more content than Cataclysm, for example, which had like 18 dungeons?

[Wondercrab]

I don't know if it's been mentioned already, but one of the major failings of Cataclysm that I think often gets overlooked was the absence of innovation in terms of game systems. Only the final content patch changed this with LFR and Transmog, but up until that point the expansion did next to nothing to mix up the formula. Every expansion before and since has made significant changes to the bread and butter of WoW's core systems, but when Cataclysm came along it was essentially just more dungeons, more raids, more quests etc.

A lot of people cite Cataclysm as the point where the game really started to feel stale, and I think a large part of this was down to the fact that it did very little to shake up the established routine. It gave everything a new coat of paint, but it didn't give us many new toys to play with until the final content patch.

[Kul Tiras]

Yes lets be honest, there's nothing wrong with having an entire expansion based on Asian culture. And stop acting like everything we face and interact on Pandaria was a panda.

You're confusing Asian with Chinese. There was no Asian culture in pandaland other than Chinese. Chen originally had Japanese inclinations as well, but they were removed to not piss of China.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't know if it's been mentioned already, but one of the major failings of Cataclysm that I think often gets overlooked was the absence of innovation in terms of game systems. Only the final content patch changed this with LFR and Transmog, but up until that point the expansion did next to nothing to mix up the formula. Every expansion before and since has made significant changes to the bread and butter of WoW's core systems, but when Cataclysm came along it was essentially just more dungeons, more raids, more quests etc.

A lot of people cite Cataclysm as the point where the game really started to feel stale, and I think a large part of this was down to the fact that it did very little to shake up the established routine. It gave everything a new coat of paint, but it didn't give us many new toys to play with until the final content patch.

There were only 2 expansions before, and BC added almost nothing to this. WOTLK added phasing. Cata brought raid finder, more complex phasing.

The established routine hasn't changed in WoW since its inception, the base systems are the same.

[Eleccybubb]

Less dungeons, raids, zones and quests than Wrath. How did it have more content than Cataclysm, for example, which had like 18 dungeons?

Cata had 14 dungeons. At least get your numbers right. That is including the 2 Zul revamps. Mists had 9 and a bunch of Scenarios which were considered mini dungeons since they awarded gear and had bosses. 5 dungeons is really nothing to complain about. Scenarios were actually half decent as they told small stories within some of them. Hell Dagger in the Dark started the setup for Escalation.

Personally I would happily trade off more dungeons for the return of Scenarios like they were in MoP. Legion had 10 dungeons at launch, brought in Karazhan and is due a new one in 7.2. And I imagine Argus will have a dungeon or something.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Less dungeons, raids, zones and quests than Wrath. How did it have more content than Cataclysm, for example, which had like 18 dungeons?

Wrath had a different patch cycle. release, Ulduar,ToC then ICC and the mini Ruby Sanctum raid. In Cata well it went release baby patch of the troll dungeons, Firelands then Dragon Soul.

[Grimo]

Good stuff:
-> Redid the entire old world content yet still had more new expansion content than either Pandaland, TimeTravelland and World of Illidanland
-> LFR system that allowed newbie raiders to see content and get some shit gear in the process
-> Rated BGs
-> Excellent dungeons and quests dripping with lore, filled with Warcraft characters we wanted to see
-> Updated all the old world lore and environments to make sense with new events, and didn't cut any corners
-> Updated graphics very heavily with water, shadows and lighting
-> Flying in Azeroth
-> Shared gathering nodes
-> New races

Not great
-> New world PVP zone
-> Cool new zone with Uldum, but shit story with that indiana jones copy paste bullshit. New race wasn't even voiced

Bullshit:
-> Thrall
-> Deathwing not having that much presence except randomly burning down patches of land in random zones
-> Long ass wait for the next shitty expansion (although no different from most end of expansions, you could unsub as always)
-> Azshara raid cut (although there was no lack of content)


---------------------------

I don't get it, how is pandaland or legion any better? They have more daily quests? Because as far as dungeons and raids are concerned, I'm pretty sure both have less. And last time I checked, pandaren and monks are both the least played race and class in the game, or constantly trading first place with gnomes and something else so.....yeah.

I've started playing since late pre-BC, winter before the AQ event. I've seen it all. Cataclysm was fucking phenomenal in many aspects, and not in my eyes worthy of the ranking it often gets classed in as "omg cacaclysm, /wrists".

A lot of this is a matter of taste. But what was objectively bad about Cataclysm was endgame. People sat in their capitals with only the dismal archaeology skill, which was boring an unrewarding, as an excuse to leave. Otherwise, they just queued up in LFG, sat in their capitals. For two. Years. The first raids were short and linear. Firelands was a cool raid, but those dailies in Hyjal were limp-dicked. Dragon Soul was a boring, stupid and totally un-epic raid.

Pandaria had a bunch of new lore to discover. Very little was rehashed. That was refreshing. Dailies were rewarding in the end and kept you busy. Throne of Thunder patch was hands down the best patch in WoW history. There was something for everyone on that island. World PvP at the landing sites was very fun on my server. Content came consistently and at a good time. Timeless Isle was a new way of doing things, with free-form exploration, and the world pvp there was fun as fuck if you liked that sort of thing. There was a reason to get out into the world. People need to grow up and get over the fact that Pandaria was Asian-inspired and featuring pandas. That doesn't reduce its quality.

[Hashtronaut]

......so you were just sitting around and were suddenly struck by an irresistible need to understand why some people didn't like Cataclysm?

Wtf?

Hahaha that was my first thought when I saw the title.
Thanks for the laugh.

[VVarpten]

LOOKING
FOR
RAID

[Shaqthefat]

late pre-BC, winter before the AQ event.

Why couldn't you just say, before the AQ event or even late classic WoW

[Kul Tiras]

Cata had 14 dungeons. At least get your numbers right. That is including the 2 Zul revamps. Mists had 9 and a bunch of Scenarios which were considered mini dungeons since they awarded gear and had bosses. 5 dungeons is really nothing to complain about. Scenarios were actually half decent as they told small stories within some of them. Hell Dagger in the Dark started the setup for Escalation.

Personally I would happily trade off more dungeons for the return of Scenarios like they were in MoP. Legion had 10 dungeons at launch, brought in Karazhan and is due a new one in 7.2. And I imagine Argus will have a dungeon or something.

How can you be so fucking disingenuous?

Cataclysm had 14 dungeons, 4 revamped.

Mists had three revamped dungeons: : SM, SH and Scholo, so in total it brought 5 new dungeons. Stormstout Brewery was a childish dungeon filled with cringe worthy children's moments and no actual Warcraft lore. I think there was some mention of the "fighting your bad emotions" stuff at the end.

Even without the revamped ones, Cataclysm's quality and variation of the dungeon locations far surpasses MOP's.

Scenarios are in no way shape or form relatable to dungeons. They are glorified scripted solo quests. I think you could do them with 2 other people? And even then their story was very shoddily written if they had any story at all. They required very little coordination or intelligence from the player, and offered no challenge. Dagger in the Dark could have just as easily be labelled a phased quest line. That's all they are, phased quest lines.

On top of that, one of their raids, terrace of whatever, was literally just a platform with stairs, it had less art and bosses than Trial of the Crusader, neither of which were memorable, interesting or innovative.

[Eleccybubb]

How can you be so fucking disingenuous?

Cataclysm had 14 dungeons, 4 revamped.

Mists had three revamped dungeons: : SM, SH and Scholo, so in total it brought 5 new dungeons. Stormstout Brewery was a childish dungeon filled with cringe worthy children's moments and no actual Warcraft lore. I think there was some mention of the "fighting your bad emotions" stuff at the end.

Even without the revamped ones, Cataclysm's quality and variation of the dungeon locations far surpasses MOP's.

Scenarios are in no way shape or form relatable to dungeons. They are glorified scripted solo quests. I think you could do them with 2 other people? And even then their story was very shoddily written if they had any story at all. They required very little coordination or intelligence from the player, and offered no challenge. Dagger in the Dark could have just as easily be labelled a phased quest line. That's all they are, phased quest lines.

Mists had 9 dungeons. Just because you don't consider 1 a dungeon doesn't suddenly change it from being one. Also those 3 were revamped for MoP. So again MoP had 9 dungeons. Cata had 14 with 4 revamps. Totally forgot about Deadmines and SFK to be honest.

[Kul Tiras]

Why couldn't you just say, before the AQ event or even late classic WoW

Because they're different things. Before the AQ event could mean 1 month or 1 year.

- - - Updated - - -

Mists had 9 dungeons. Just because you don't consider 1 a dungeon doesn't suddenly change it from being one. Also it was revamped for MoP. So again MoP had 9 dungeons.

Also Cata had 2 revamps. Zul'Aman and Zul'gurub. Would love to know the other 2.

Wow I make a fucking typo and you make a big deal out of -1, which still doesn't defend your argument in any way. Of course, it's the only thing you can jump on so you do, and ignore the rest.

Cata also had SFK and VC revamped. Dude were you even here during those times?

[Eleccybubb]

Because they're different things. Before the AQ event could mean 1 month or 1 year.

- - - Updated - - -



Wow I make a fucking typo and you make a big deal out of -1, which still doesn't defend your argument in any way. Of course, it's the only thing you can jump on so you do, and ignore the rest.

Cata also had SFK and VC revamped. Dude were you even here during those times?

Yep. Read above. I said I forgot. God forbid I forget something that was nearly 7 years ago.

[Kul Tiras]

......so you were just sitting around and were suddenly struck by an irresistible need to understand why some people didn't like Cataclysm?

Wtf?

I see it often, and it makes no sense to me, when an expansion like pandaria, for example, had less content of less quality.